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Drei Gesänge, Op 31

Recordings

Schumann’s songs are among the greatest musical achievements of the nineteeth century, and this is the perfect release with which to mark the composer’s 200th birthday. This marvellous collection comprises Schumann’s complete songs, presented for ...» More

'The collaboration of Keenlyside and Johnson is so potent that after an hour one is still ready for more' (Gramophone)'No singer has sung them so beautifully or so naturally as Simon Keenlyside' (BBC Music Magazine)» More

'An unqualified success … a glorious interpreter, warm-voiced and wholly in sympathy with the task in hand. The famous cycle Frauenliebe und Lebe ...'The care that has gone into the literary and musicological side of the project is perfectly matched by the musical results. Banse proves to be a wond ...» More

'Recorded sound is impeccable and Johnson's notes are, as always, a joy in and of themselves. Necessary for collectors of this edition, and for the Sc ...'This probing, absorbing account of Schumann's op.24 Liederkreis is as good as any you're ever likely to hear' (Fanfare, USA)» More

This latest release from the multi-award-winning partnership of Gerald Finley and Julius Drake features a literary and musical form which inspired the greatest voices of German Romanticism. The foremost poets and composers of the age saw the balla ...» More

While Robert Schumann is revered above all as the master of the epigrammatic lyric, he also wrote several songs modelled on the narrative ballads of Loewe, a composer he greatly admired. Composed in July 1840, two months before his marriage to Clara Wieck, Die Löwenbraut sets a lurid and, to modern tastes, laughable tale by Adelbert von Chamisso, author of the Frauenliebe und -leben poems. After a keyboard prelude evoking the prowling beast’s massive tread, the voice intones a stark quasi-folk melody on which Schumann will later build the song’s gnarled chromatic climax. When the bride speaks (‘Wir waren in Tagen, die nicht mehr sind’), the music slips from G minor to an assuaging G major with an unmistakable allusion to Widmung, the opening song of the Myrthen collection that Schumann would present to Clara on their wedding day. Even with his marriage now virtually assured, Schumann doubtless identified Chamisso’s ‘rosige Maid’ with Clara—hence the Widmung reference. Perhaps he even associated the old lion with her father Friedrich Wieck, who from the outset had implacably opposed their union.

This is one of the strangest of all Schumann’s songs. On one level the poem is ludicrous. On another, it must have struck a chord with the composer who realized that his Clara was dangerously in two minds about marrying him because it inevitably meant hurting and alienating her father. Thus we are tempted to cast old man Wieck, with his mane of hair and his leonine nature, as the lion who attempted to maul Schumann in the courts to stop him taking away his daughter. The uncomfortable question remains, however, as to why the lion comes across somehow as the long-suffering hero of the song; we feel more engaged with his fate than by the girl’s death. Sams puts this down to essential Schumannian kindliness, as if the composer was intrinsically too good-natured to write a song of sufficient vehemence to express his hate for his prospective father-in-law.

Another possibility is that Schumann thought of himself as the old lion – he was, after all, nine years older than his intended. It must have been his worst nightmare that Clara would find someone else ‘more suitable’, and that the woman whom he had counted on as being his bride would come to him to explain why, after all, she could not marry him. She had done so before, fleeing to Paris and Vienna. Much of the background story whispered by the girl in the third strophe might also apply to Schumann. For example, the composer had known Clara since she was nine years old and he was a youth of eighteen who had come to Leipzig to study the piano with Wieck – they had truly grown up together as ‘treue Gespielen, wie Kind und Kind’. When the bride breaks the news of her imminent departure to the lion it is significant that she does so using the strains of Widmung (‘Du meine Seele, du mein Herz’) which headed the collection of songs (Myrthen) which Robert dedicated ‘to his beloved bride’ as a wedding present. We hear this melody, with variants, time and time again, as if the hidden significance of melody were a secret means of maid and lion communicating (such musical codes were employed during Robert and Clara’s blighted courtship). The composer may well have identified with the poem in that he loved Clara so much that he would sooner have seen her dead than married to anyone else; he was prepared to die himself, shot through the heart if need be, before giving her up; and if she was never to be his, she was never going to belong to another. In his darker and more depressed moments he was perfectly capable of violent thoughts like these. Perhaps he saw himself as a badly treated, inarticulate beast denied a hearing; he was already a crown prince of Germany’s musical jungle, but his emotional circumstances kept him constrained in a cage of emotions. The date of the song precedes the decision of the court in August 1840 that the marriage was to be allowed to go ahead after all.

There is thus a certain plainness about the Schumann ballads which one might attribute to lessened inspiration but which is almost certainly the result of an attempt to write music which borders on melodrama. Instead of a spoken text with musical accompaniment, the voice is required to sing in a manner which is often nearer speech than a full flowering of melody. That this composer had a taste for sprawling narrative ballads of this sort (different from the dimensions of most his songs) may seem rather strange to the listener; but there are other works in the Schumann canon (for example, Blondels Lied and Der Handschuh) which confirm that he regarded it as part of his duty not entirely to ignore the ballad tradition furthered by Schubert and continued, above all, by Loewe. In his ballad mode Schumann does not usually attempt to conjure the pianistically-generated magical atmospheres of his shorter Lieder. Instead he allows the poem to do the lion’s share of work in the unfolding of the narrative; pianistic embroidery which may get in the way of clear enunciation of the text is avoided, and the piano’s main role is confined mostly to interludes which are fashioned into ritornello-like commentary. The composer’s use of alla breve notation (and in the case of Die Löwenbraut a time signature of the old CC for 4/2) is also significant. His affection for solid old German traditions such as these comes to the fore when he is confronted with ballad texts. It is as if he wishes to emulate the troubadours and minstrels of old, and to invent a nineteenth-century version of their musical utterance.

The piano opens with prowling octaves deep in the bass that signify the pacing of the lion in his cage. The right hand joins in quasi-canon at the end of the first bar transferring this leonine melody into the treble clef and harmonizing it. The music now takes on the aspect of an organ improvisation with deep and ominous pedal notes. The mezzo staccato quavers that end the introduction imply something ominous – suspense is in the air and something nasty is about to happen. We hear these bars four times in all – twice towards the beginning of the song, once in the middle, and once right at the end by way of postlude. The music deliberately suggests long ago: we are transported to a castle in German times of yore where lions were kept for a king’s amusement. The inexactitude of the song’s location in time and place seems compounded by the recitative-like vagueness of the vocal line for the poem’s first two verses; this musters something of a melody but is really closer to speech. The heroine, in bridal gown, is introduced without further ado; our story begins, as it were, in the middle, and in a manner which deepens the mystery. (In the same manner Debussy, sixty years later, introduced Mélisande at the beginning of his excursion into the mysterious realm of Allemonde.) The keeper’s daughter is given voice in the third verse and adopts a tone of repetitive melodic simplicity, as if she were speaking to a child, or an animal. It is the length of her utterance (five verses), always centred around the same somewhat wheedling notes, which is the song’s greatest challenge to the performers; a male singer has to adopt a suitably gentle colour while avoiding feminine parody. The key signature changes from G minor to G major and the music moves tremulously between this key and D major during the girl’s extended explanation. At ‘Ich aber muss folgen, sie taten mir’s an’ there is a submissive shift into C major, the subdominant, to imply the sacred and obedient implications of the wedding ceremony about to take place. After this, the girl’s speech becomes more fraught, and also more interesting. Both voice and piano abandon the hymn-book simplicity of the preceding pages; clinging crotchet triplets introduce a note of desperate pathos as well as incipient eroticism as the voice rises in tessitura. At ‘Verstehst du mich ganz?’ the key signature returns to G minor, the first sign that the lion is not taking the news lying down.

The ritornello returns and we should now hear the lion’s pacing music as something positively dangerous. Schumann’s turning the screw of tension is cleverly done. The same melody which seemed gentle and innocuous at the beginning is now punctuated by louder chords, ornaments and flashing demisemiquaver shudders in the piano’s left hand. At ‘Sie flehend, gebietend und drohend begehrt Hinaus’ the ivory-keyed beast and its keeper, the accompanist, are at last unleashed from their restraints. Double-dotted rhythms in pounding octaves leap from one end of the keyboard to the other – all this initially seems effective, especially because the piano’s participation has been so understated in the song’s first four pages. In a noble, though ultimately unsuccessful, attempt to simulate the lion’s roar, the accompanist is allowed a voice-free interlude of his own – a veritable orgy of chromatic off-beat suspensions growling in the bass which meet their agonized feminine response in the treble. This Grand Guignol effusion leads to the tumultuous tenth and eleventh verses. The same vocal melody as before is judiciously transposed up a minor third to enable the voice to compete with the piano at full tilt. Schumann invokes everything in his musical shopping maul to suggest crunch, bite, lash and mutilation. The most notable feature here is the leaping of semiquavers which spring, as if propelled by muscular haunches, from deep in the bass and land on left-hand chords as rapaciously as a wild animal throwing himself onto a carcass. All good stuff perhaps, if not at all believable. The actual scene described is so bloody that a musical depiction of it does not seem possible or effective, certainly not within the confines of the Lied. Indeed it borders dangerously on unintentional comedy.

The return of the same melody for the last verse now seems merely perfunctory. The beast’s power is spent, and he has peaked at the same time as the composer. Die Löwenbraut is a noble attempt at a ballad in the grand manner, but Schumann does not quite have that old lion Loewe’s flair for the form. The destruction of the animal/murderer at the end is deliberately down-played; not a gunshot to be heard, only a repeat of the ritornello and an instruction to play its last bar in a funereal adagio. We feel the same sense of anticlimax in two other Schumann songs – the closing bars of Die beiden Grenadiere at the death of the French soldier, and the shooting of the soldier lad at the end of Der Soldat. It is as if Schumann shrinks from anything which might suggest the unpleasant finality of the coup de grâce. Perhaps he instinctively refused to take on the role of executioner, even in his songs. Death fills this composer with horror, and when it must be musically described it is always done quietly (as at the inconclusive cadence at ‘trifft in das Herz’ in this song) as if he is experiencing it with the victims, as quiet extinction from within, rather than explosive voyeuristic drama. One can only return to the thought that Schumann chose to set this poem, so unlike his other Chamisso settings, for special reasons of personal empathy and identification with the plight of its unlikely (to say the least) characters.

Has mother finally fallen asleep
Over her book of sermons?
You, my needle, now lie still,
Stop this constant sewing!
Oh, what things can I expect,
Oh, how will it all end?

If I am not deceived,
One, I think of, will appear,
Jolly good, here he comes,
The knave of hearts has done his duty.
A rich widow? Dear, oh dear.
Yes, he woos her, I’m undone,
Oh! the wicked scoundrel.

Heartache and much vexation,
A school with restricting walls,
But the king of diamonds will take pity
And comfort me.
A nicely delivered present,
He elopes with me, a journey
Money and happiness in abundance.

This king of diamonds
Must be a prince or king,
Which means that it won’t take much
For me to be a princess.
Here’s a foe, who strives to soil
My name before His Majesty,
And a fair-haired man is there as well.

A secret comes to light,
And I escape just in time,
Farewell, O life of splendour,
Ah, that was a cruel blow.
The one is gone, a crowd
Surges around me
That I can scarcely count them all.

Schumann here displays a side to his creative nature that might almost be termed operatic. Or at least it is the same type of ‘operatic’ flair that Schubert also possessed in great measure: the ability to ‘stage’ a lyric as if a director’s hand had lovingly plotted gesture, movement, even lighting. Here a miniature is rendered more varied and eventful than one would have thought possible. On the other hand, the opposite skill of writing opera requires a command of the larger shape beneath all the detail – theatrical savoir faire lacked by both Schubert and Schumann, possibly as a result of their fervent response to verbal minutiae. Their capacity to illustrate words (one may say translate them into a musical language) may have led them astray in writing for the stage, but it propelled them to glory in song. The crux of this innate Lieder-composing ability lies in the way in which the accompaniment is developed not in general terms with a broad brush, but in response to the most tiny details. The prosody and inflection of the vocal line also counts for a great deal, as does the movement of harmony – in Die Kartenlegerin, for example, each new turn of the cards is mirrored by a new twist in harmonic tension, as if a turn of the screw.

The time signature of 2/8 is unique in Schumann. The bars bustle to the point of overflowing with flouncing petticoats and feminine caprice. Schumann possibly knew that Béranger’s original poem was to be sung to the air of ‘La petite gouvernante’; the French poem tells us that the girl, Suzon, is sixteen, and everything in the music implies the delicacy and femininity of someone small and slender, even the miniaturised time-signature. And the ornamental detail in the piano writing seems to imply that she is dressed in the eighteenth-century dress that can be seen in illustrated editions of Béranger, chansonnier of his time. The actress Philine (from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister) who features in Singet nicht in Trauertönen (Volume 1) is also an eighteenth-century personality, and Schumann responds to her with music of similar flightiness contained within a strict duple pulse: in both these E flat major songs there are whalebone corsets beneath the free-flowing ribbons. Like Philine, this devotee of horoscopes and cards is a minx – no better than she should be, but rather more fun than the average German girl. And unlike Philine, the little fortune-teller is French. Like both Wolf and Brahms, Schumann had a theoretical fondness for ungovernable girls of southern sensibility. The petulance of this little midinette is to be found again in some of the women from the Geibel settings of 1849, notably Weh, wie zornig ist das Mädchen from the Spanisches Liebeslieder. At first sight, her wilfully self-centred character seems a long way from the most famous of Chamisso’s feminine creations, the deeply German protagonist of Frauenliebe und -leben. But both characters depend on marriage to better themselves. The girl admits (in Béranger’s original) that she is ‘peu faite pour être ouvrière’.

The demisemiquaver motif in the piano’s right hand which opens the song is a creation of genius. The bustle (as already noted, both sassy and sartorial), the youthful, and very feminine, energy, the suspense (and sheer fun) of a girl taking her pleasures behind the back of parental authority are all contained therein. The crispness of the texture also suggests the shuffling of cards where staccato chords in the accompaniment resemble the snap of a card turned up from the deck. The vocal line makes something memorable out of very little (it is the type of jingle that may come into the head as one is drumming one’s fingers with boredom) and the accompaniment is kept to a minimum too – pert little staccato demisemiquavers, at first on and then off the beat to show how all that sewing is driving our heroine to distraction. The accompaniment at the repeat of ‘nähen, immer nähen, nein’ suggests the whirring of stitching – a sewing machine could do no better. All this work is thrown aside, and the piano staves are momentarily empty. The covert nature of what is about to take place is perfectly suggested by the conspiratorial little scales, first of all in the vocal line, and then matched by the left-hand accompaniment in contrary motion.

The second strophe begins with the same music as the first, but soon diversifies in detail. The laddish gait of the Knave of Hearts is perfectly caught by the left-hand stride accompaniment under ‘Schön, da kommt er, ja der eine’. Her marital plans for this poker stud are ruined by the sudden appearance in the cards of a rich widow (an eloquent cry of ‘Wehe’ on a diminished chord escapes almost involuntarily) whose wealth seduces the would-be suitor. The curse of ‘verruchter Bösewicht’ is scarcely ladylike; had the sleeping mother been awake she would have been shocked by her daughter’s language.

Now that the first chance of a fairytale marriage has been ruled out, she must look for others. The tension mounts in a new section which the composer has marked ‘Schneller’ (at ‘Herzeleid und viel Verdruss’), a marking suitable for the combination of panic and lust of a young lady on the rebound. This section very cleverly uses sequences and subtle key-shifts to emphasise each new turn of the cards, the harmony staying in one place only long enough for the girl to interpret each new deal. In the right hand, the use of syncopation and off-beat accent is a perfect means of illustrating her gasps of pleasurable surprise. By the end of the strophe she has convinced herself that the love of the King of Diamonds will make her rich. There is an appropriate royal pomposity about the dotted rhythm settings of ‘Geld und Lust im Überfluss’. At the end of the strophe, in order to illustrate ‘Überfluss’, the vocal line spills over into the lower regions of the stave, and the contrary-motion scales collide between the hands as the surfeit of riches is matched by the clinking of glasses and jostling high spirits.

The fourth strophe begins with a small meditation on the pleasures of her future royal life. This is interrupted by the discovery of an enemy in the cards, and once again the girl is on her own. The support of the accompaniment is withdrawn on ‘Hier ein Feind’, and contrary circumstances are reflected by contrary scales. On the last word of ‘Und ein Blonder steht mir nah’ the semitone rise from B flat to B natural in the vocal line perfectly conveys a turn-up for the books (or cards), this time not exuberantly but in some trepidation. As in the earlier card-turning sequence, harmony plays a crucial part in the unveiling of the successive revelations. This time, however, the key sequences fall rather than rise, and drain away all pleasurable expectation. Perky syncopations are replaced by lifeless quavers which are tokens of disillusionment. A short recitative closes this section: the appearance of a number of men, a crowd of them in fact, is no consolation. On the contrary, it prompts the most substantial interlude where the motif of the opening is brilliantly re-worked to show the pangs of confusion and distress. The flurry of this music had seemed pertly self-assured. But these mournful little demisemiquavers, punctuated by sighing motifs and tossed between the pianist’s left and right hand, sound stranded and lost in a sea of uncertain tonality. It seems that the girl is at a loss to interpret what she sees in the cards. (At this point Schumann leaves out a verse of Chamisso’s translation: in this Suzon meets a grey-haired landowner, marries him and goes to live in Paris, oblivious to his scolding and intent on a good time.)

The final strophe is a good-natured return to reality and to the music of the song’s opening. The cards predict the irascibility of an old woman who has come to ruin all her fun. With her mother awake and liable to scold her for wasting time at the card-table, the girl ruefully admits to the accuracy of her fortune-telling. In a remarkable touch of characterisation, Schumann suggests a girl’s shrug at this turn of events, merrily dispatching the song in a mood of high spirits. Her closing lines have been composed in such a way that we see that she only half believes in the power of horoscopes, and that she can laugh at her own gullibility. Her sense of humour (admirably emphasised by the chuckling descent of the postlude where all her plans topple over like a house of cards) is more important than any dalliance with the occult. Schumann and Chamisso succeed in making this girl rather nicer than the calculating operator encountered in Béranger’s poem (‘Je suis cruelle’ admits the French version). But that may merely be the difference between homely Leipzig and sophisticated, heartless Paris.

With her baby at her breast
And her second boy astride her back,
She leads by the hand her oldest boy
Who is half-naked, barefoot and freezing.
The father has been arrested,
He’s cooling off in jail.
God be with you, red-haired Hannah!
The poacher’s under lock and key.

I often saw her in happier days,
The schoolmaster's gentle daughter;
She would sing and spin and read and sew,
A charming child, so spruce and clean;
Each Sunday she danced beneath the limes,
So happily and joyfully!
God be with you, red-haired Hannah!
The poacher's under lock and key.

A young, rich and handsome farmer
Once promised her a better fate;
People laughed at her red hair,
The wealthy suitor jilted her;
Others came and likewise went,
Because she had no dowry.
God be with you, red-haired Hannah!
The poacher’s under lock and key.

A scoundrel quickly made up his mind:
Whether your hair's blonde or red, I'll marry you;
I have three guns and know all the tricks –
The gamekeeper doesn't bother me;
I’ll even pay the preacher
Who will marry us.
God be with you, red-haired Hannah!
The poacher’s under lock and key.

She did not refuse him, her heart quickened
With nature’s gentle promptings,
And three times alone in the forest
She knew the bitter joys of giving birth.
The children grew up and flourished,
And all enjoyed rude health.
God be with you, red-haired Hannah!
The poacher’s under lock and key.

But now the faithful wife finds comfort
In her nightly distress.
She smiles: her children will have
Their father’s curly black hair;
She smiles: and her smile
Gives the prisoner fresh courage.
God be with you, red-haired Hannah!
The poacher’s under lock and key.

Béranger’s title was Jeanne la rousse, ou la femme du braconnier – ‘Red haired Jane, or the wife of the poacher’. Chamisso’s translation does not appear in the first edition of his poems (1831 – the original had not yet been published). In the second edition (1834) it is to be found alongside the light-hearted Die Kartenlegerin (Hyperion Schumann Edition Volume 3). Another translation from Béranger, Der Bettler (The Beggar), is typical of the Franco-German poet’s left-wing sympathies. There are other mendicant Chamisso poems including the famous ‘The Beggar and his Dog’ that were not set to music – by Schumann at any rate. Béranger was not a political poet, but he was left-leaning enough to have been twice imprisoned during the reign of Charles X. His celebrated verbal vignettes are not usually based on first-hand research, but he was as fascinated by the experiences of the lowest strata of society as he was by life at the top of the social tree. The final toppling of the Bourbon monarchy in Louis Philippe’s revolution of 1830 had made Paris a new centre of freedom (in 1831 it became Heine’s new home to the stern disapproval of German conservatives).

We take it for granted that every beggar in the street has a story behind his or her misfortune; it seems obvious that a descent into such a pitiable state is the result of terrible circumstances. Chamisso makes no assumptions of his readership’s sympathies. He tells the story of red-haired Jane in the manner of a new-born social reformer. It was a relatively rare thing in Schumann’s epoch for affluent Germans to be curious about the poor. At a time when the excesses of the French revolution were still a living memory for the older members of the European middle-classes, compassionate understanding of the underdog could not to be taken for granted. Poaching was still a hanging offence in England. Many considered reforming journalists and novelists such as Charles Dickens to be dangerous do-gooders.

Chamisso was an egalitarian by nature, and Schumann prided himself on his liberalism. They felt it their duty to take an enlightened interest in society’s outcasts. Perhaps this self-conscious earnestness accounts for the impersonality of this music. The character of Jane sadly fails to match the colour of her hair in terms of vibrant realism: the poem reads like a social services file, more so in German translation than in the original French. Without the help of a commentator poor Jane is inarticulate, and Schumann has treated her story in a musical vocabulary that matches the poverty of her means. Much of this music denotes, almost too successfully, the abject apathy of the poor. Within the same few days the composer had set Chamisso’s Die Löwenbraut (Hyperion Schumann Edition, Volume 2) in a deliberately simple ballad style, linked by repeating ritornelli, and with a vocal line supported by an accompaniment pared down to the essentials. Ballads of this style were Schumann’s response to the admiration of the romantic Zeitgeist for neo-medieval minstrelsy (Blondels Lied – Hyperion Schumann Edition Volume3). This is clearly appropriate for a song about a medieval minstrel, and in such costume-drama narratives as Die Löwenbraut and Schiller’s Der Handschuh. Die rote Hanne is clearly not a medieval story; unlike Der Handschuh it does not describe a joust with cheering crowds, but it has something of the courtroom about it, not to mention the workhouse. The recurring SATB chorus, unique in the Schumann solo lieder (‘Sei Gott du mit der roten Hanne’ etc), suggests either a jury, or the sung commentary of the common people as in Peter Grimes. This song is clearly a ballad of a different kind, perhaps a very early example of the ‘Moritat’ – the street ballad typical of political protest between the two World Wars. The exaggerated musical simplicity of Brecht settings by Eisler or Dessau seems comparable.

For four of the six strophes the melody remains as repetitive as a hymn tune without a memorable melody. To be fair to Schumann he is aiming for a quasi parlando narrative style. The accompaniment for the first two strophes of Die rote Hanne is simple enough to suit a harmonium. In the third strophe the advent of the good-looking suitor is greeted with rippling quavers in the right hand, the quickening of desire. The third strophe which describes the coupling of maid and poacher (‘Ein Taugenichts war schnell entschlossen’) becomes more pianistically aggressive. The hymn tune is pushed aside here by the urgency of this rough wooing. Here we recall Tragödie I – ‘Entflieh’ mit mir und sei mein Weib’ – where a syncopated accompaniment describes a similarly sexual impatience. The piano writing and the passively acquiescent vocal line return to normal for the fifth strophe when Jane gives birth to her children alone in the forest. The final strophe draws the threads of the story together with new music, a final chorus which abandons the woebegone narrative in favour of a new melody; hope and laughter enter these downtrodden lives at last. The final chorus is a rousing one as if a nagging problem has at last been solved. The postlude reminds us not to be quite so optimistic.

It is scarcely believable that Schumann wrote this song within days of sketching Frauenliebe und -leben. That cycle left its heroine a grieving widow supported only by her memories of love. Jane, on the other hand, is the partner of someone who has fallen foul of the law. It would not have been lost on Schumann that Wieck, his future father-in-law, had denounced him as a criminal. If the composer here casts himself as the arrested poacher, and Jane as Clara, we can only come to the conclusion that his identification with the characters was not quite strong enough. He was drawn to the poem, his sympathy was roused, but the gap between his own experience and that of his briefly adopted characters is too wide. It was important to him that the faithfulness of the heroine (and she is a heroine of sorts) remained intact and rewarded. Jane will wait for her man until he is released, no matter what his drawbacks may be. The poem and the stoic character of the music leave the redheaded girl and the father of her children with a glimmer of hope.